What it lacks in content it makes up for in length

I’m on holiday, I thought. I’ll have loads of free time, I thought. But the husband’s on leave with me this week, and we’re both conscious that my free time will be severely curtailed next week, and so we’ve been approaching the holiday like I’m going off to war. The result is that between the day trips, the evenings out and the incessant bonking, I’ve not had a lot of time to blog. Today, however, I’ve been felled by a cold and so I’m back in my old familiar spot in front of the computer.

I feel like I should blog about Melbourne. I had a blast, but I don’t really have much to say. Everyone smokes, the women are all incredibly hot (there was a heatwave, so there seemed to be smooth slim legs everywhere), and if you know where to look you can happily spend an evening drinking wasabi caprioskas. It was a good time.

Onto other things.

As I said, I’m battling a cold. Well, that sounds rather more dramatic than it is. More accurately, a cold gave me a threatening look and I immediately handed over my wallet and jewellery and tried not to cry.

Anyway, I can’t breathe through my nose properly, which must have made sleeping next to me terribly pleasant last night. This morning I took a very long, very hot shower in an attempt to clear the airways (I don’t know how this works, but I’m told it does) and found myself singing an embarrassing little song to the tune of The Addams Family. You don’t need me to inflict the lyrics on you, but suffice it to say that it began with “I’m sniffly and I’m snuffly”…yeah, I'm going to leave it at that. Believe it or not, sometimes I can pass for sophisticated.

Anyway, I then started to think about this habit I have of making up ridiculous little rhyming songs, and I realised that my mother always did the same thing when we were young. I was always impressed that she could make up rhymes on the spur of the moment. That’s the nice thing about kids; they’re easily impressed. I’m sure that if I’d caught her singing when I was fourteen, I’d have sniffed about the lack of iambic pentameter and then wandered down to the rocky shore to stare soulfully at the waves. And yes, I really did have a rocky shore to wander down to at fourteen. All teenagers should, if you ask me.

What the hell was I talking about? Oh, right. Singing little songs. Both the husband and I do this, so I was idly thinking how whimsical and charming we would be as parents, how other people would say to us, oh, you two, you were just born to be parents, how we’d be the envy of our children’s classmates…

And then a telemarketer rang and broke into my reverie. After I’d politely got rid of him and went to dress, I heard the husband – who’d had to abandon an intricate art piece he was working on in order to grab the phone - singing a little song to himself. Ah, how whimsical, I thought. And then I realised that, to the tune of the Banana Boat Song*, he was singing: Fuck off, fuck off…

Maybe we shouldn’t have kids just yet.

*I had to look up the title of this song. I think of it as the Day-o song. You know the one, right?